


Lucien's Teachers Just Want Him to Stop Selling Oregano to the Other Students

by fascinationex



Category: Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Parent-Teacher Meetings, Silly, is this humour i feel like i don't even know anymore, please let hugo vega take a nap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-04
Updated: 2019-10-04
Packaged: 2020-11-23 10:03:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20890316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fascinationex/pseuds/fascinationex
Summary: Expecting Damien and instead getting Robert was perhaps one of the least pleasant shocks of Hugo's recent professional life.





	Lucien's Teachers Just Want Him to Stop Selling Oregano to the Other Students

Contrary to popular belief, Hugo didn't actually love tormenting his students. He was not, in fact, the fun police. Some students just made it_ very hard on themselves_.

If Hugo hadn't been Lucien's teacher, he might even have liked the boy. He was bright, he was engaged, and he had... some behavioural idiosyncrasies that probably needed to be better managed than they were.

Not that Hugo was likely to judge Damien for that.

That might invite someone to reflect on Ernest's behaviour, and...

Ha. Haha.

_Anyway_.

The principal's office was a boring, tidy place that didn't look much different from the teachers' own desks in their room - it was just bigger, tidier, and less communal. There were shelves with binders and old text books, a bulky computer that had seen better days, a phone and several chairs. The principal was an older man, Mr Ert, a little out of shape, a little tired around the eyes behind his wire-framed glasses. He didn't like having his afternoons disrupted by unruly students.

It was very clear in the steady, judgemental way he looked at Hugo, at Lucien, and at the other student involved. Maria, fifteen. She wasn't in Hugo's classes but she was apparently the kind of student who tried to _buy oregano behind the sports equipment sheds at lunch time._

Hugo didn't like taking students to the principal's office. He didn't even like being there, himself.

At this point, Lucien didn't even seem to recognise that being escorted to the principal's office was supposed to be an indicator of bad behaviour. To him, this was basically just a Tuesday. He sat there, slumped, bored, tapping his fingers on the arms of his chair while the principal clenched his jaw and waited for someone to answer the phone. He'd had no trouble contacting Maria's family. Her mother had been unavailable, but her father had been at home.

Typical, Hugo thought idly, of a two-parent family. Someone would be available to make time.

"Well," the principal said, when he finally got Damien on the line by calling the main line of his workplace and asking the receptionist to put him on, "somebody needs to come and collect Lucien, as he's facing suspension."

Lucien seemed colossally unconcerned, staring blankly out the window as though all this was just, _so_ too uncool for his attention. Hugo wondered if he had actually thought about how much he was inconveniencing his father right now. If Damien really couldn't pick him up, Hugo would probably take him home himself.

Eventually there was some agreement reached, and the principal instructed them to sit quietly and wait until their parents could be brought in to discuss the seriousness of the offence. Hugo was obliged to stay, because Mr Ert found himself unable to supervise in short order. Probably, Hugo suspected, he had stepped out specifically to avoid the silent, tense atmosphere that only two sulking teenagers could bring to a person's office. He didn't return until ten minutes later, which was just about when Maria's father showed up.

He was dark haired, clean-shaven. He shook Ert's hand, but not Hugo's, and patted Maria comfortingly on the shoulder. The look he shot Lucien was more confused than hostile.

"John. Thank you for coming," said Ert gravely, gesturing him into a seat. "We're just waiting on, ah, that is, Mister Bloodmarch," he said. Everyone politely ignored his stumbling.

He saw John mouth '_Bloodmarch_' silently to himself.

They waited.

And waited.

Finally someone came for Lucien, but it wasn't Damien.

Hugo, he _heard_ him coming, but it took him a few moments too long to pay attention. There was just a short, frozen second where instead of the rapid, nervous click-click-click of Damien's heeled boots, he could hear the creak of leather and the faint scuff of Robert's limp in the echoing hall of the school building.

_Oh, sweet manchego, no_, he thought. But it was already much too late for that.

He'd expected Damien standing there, carefully put together, earnest with his hands clasped and his brow furrowed, peering between Lucien and this week's fellow miscreant and/or victim. 

Instead the door swung open, and what they got was Robert. And Robert...

Robert smelled like a distillery. A distillery conveniently located in a leather treatment plant. 

He tugged on the collar of his jacket, hooded eyes staring out at them all. Hugo consciously didn't cross his arms. Robert Small, he was sure, had a lot of redeeming qualities. And if he looked hard enough, perhaps he'd even find one of them. Hugo wasn't convinced that he belonged within five miles of a school full of impressionable young students to whom he might, however mistakenly, appear... _cool_.

"Erm," said Mr Ert.

"Damien called. I'm here about Lucien," Robert said, kicking the door shut behind him with the heel of one boot. It slammed shut.

"And you are...?"

"Small. Robert Small. Damien's... partner."

Happily, John didn't do more than blink at Robert referring to himself as the partner of a male parent. Hugo felt something between his shoulders unknot. He'd known that the school didn't tolerate that sort of thing, but sometimes individual parents... Well. Hugo was glad, that was all. Sometimes coming out felt like a thing that happened every day, sometimes quite unexpectedly, over and over. He rolled one shoulder.

Robert ambled in and sat down in the remaining seat, legs sprawled out, eyes bloodshot and too intense as he stared at Mr Ert.

Slowly, he turned and looked at Hugo, too. They didn't know each other well. They were neighbours, not friends. But the look was clearly familiar, and in the silent pause of it, Hugo felt a headache coming on already.

Robert met the eyes of the principal and of Maria and John, and then finally he turned his scruffy face toward Lucien. "I'm not gonna sugar coat it, kid," he said, bluntly in his gravelly voice, "the girl looks shifty. But you've got to maintain your cover. I can't be slacking on the hunt to come pull you out of the fire every time."

This extraordinary speech was followed by a short pause. 

Lucien glanced toward Robert and made a short, dismissive noise. "Whatever," he said, and rolled his eyes and looked away again.

"Ex -- excuse me?" John sputtered, sitting up straighter, which only attracted Robert's attention.

"Listen," he said, leaning forward, too close to John, resting all his weight upon one elbow on the arm of his chair. "You need help with your," he glanced at Maria right past her father, then swallowed hard, shot a wary look toward the window, and returned his too-close, too-intense attention back to John, "your kid," he said, like he knew something about her that they didn't, like 'kid' wasn't the word he really meant, "I know a guy who knows a guy, right? We'll get it all straightened out."

Lucien sighed, long and deep and weary of Robert's shit.

"Mr Small, I don't think --" Mr Ert began, brow furrowed.

"What are you _implying_?" John wondered.

"Implying? I'm _not_ implying. I'm _telling_ you. You have no idea... and it’ll be hard," Robert said. Something about the heaviness of his attention and intensity of his voice changed the atmosphere, made it harder to think at a pace any faster than he was talking. His fingers flexed on the arm of his chair, and his voice lowered a little, grave but sincere: "But… once you’ve seen. Really seen. You’ll make it. You’re not alone."

There was a long, long pause. The clock on the wall ticked, soft.

Maybe if Hugo asked the right way he could get Robert in to do readings. Some of the younger children would really benefit from this kind of enthusiasm -- and from his storytelling skill. It would be nice, as an English teacher, if he could increase the number of students who could be persuaded to _actually read the text_.

"Actually," said Mr Ert, interrupting the silence following this extraordinary speech. He cleared his throat. "Actually, we're here to discuss Lucien's behaviour this afternoon--"

"You what," said Robert flatly.

Hugo backed away to stand against the wall. He couldn't leave, but he already anticipated a much longer and less productive meeting than the one he'd planned.

* * *

Somewhere across the other side of Maple Bay, a medium sized real estate agency was having a server crisis. "I think this will fix it," Damien said hopefully. He was met with a dubious noise from one of his colleagues, which he ignored. 

Thank goodness, he thought, that Robert had agreed to handle whatever might be happening at the school this afternoon. Damien just couldn't possibly have gotten away...

Being a single parent was hard work.

A moment later, even though the latest reboot seemed to show no indication of another problem, Damien looked up from his screen and felt the overwhelming urge to bury his face in his hands -- odd, because as somebody who wore a lot of makeup very frequently, he knew better.

Perhaps it was work related stress?

* * *

The meeting was interminable. Time seemed to slow to the consistency of cold molasses on a frosty morning, dripping one second at a time in achingly extended moments. Nothing existed outside the moment: just the office, the dull drone of insects outside, the confused and increasingly angry little exchanges as Mr Ert and John played along with Robert in a game to which they didn't know the rules. Neither of them was rude enough to come out and say that Robert straight-up didn't make sense, or that he was lying, or that he was _obviously drunk_, so the conversation went in circles, around and around, like a non-existent cryptid chasing its tail. 

Hugo contemplated the window. Not _seriously_. He wanted to keep his job. But... he nevertheless contemplated it.

There was a bead of sweat dripping down the dip of his spine, between his shoulders, beneath his stifling summer-weight shirt. He shifted on his feet.

Expecting Damien and getting Robert was perhaps one of the least pleasant shocks of Hugo's recent professional life.

Lucien followed his gaze, looked back at him, and then looked at Robert. He looked back at Hugo. Hugo raised his eyebrow incrementally -- which was probably more than he should have done in response, given that Lucien was _meant_ to be paying attention to the conversation (argument) happening between the adults. Maria certainly was, with her big dark eyes cutting from one adult to another, showing what was probably an appropriate anxiety response to the situation in which she found herself. It was better than Lucien was doing.

Robert had progressed to explaining that everything that Mr Ert and John believed was due to some conspiracy that he was refusing to elaborate on. It was going nowhere fast.

...It wasn't like Lucien was a bad kid. He was bright, he did his reading, he showed up to most of his classes -- more than Ernest, anyway, Hugo thought in despair -- and he had an oddly strong grasp on the genre conventions of the gothic.

Lucien raised his eyebrows right back at Hugo, and Hugo, against his better judgement, paid attention.

Lucien narrowed his eyes and tipped his head toward the window.

_No_, Hugo thought. _**Absolutely not.** _

He turned away. Lucien sighed, loudly and boredly.

"You aren't even the boy's actual father," said John. He had apparently figured that much out pretty quickly. This, among so many other comments, made one of Lucien's shoulders twitch. 

Robert made a short, derisive noise in his throat. "No? That's what they want you to believe," he said, smoothly and confidently, evincing the strange power of people everywhere who just came out and said things baldly and expected you to act like you believed them just because you wouldn't call them a liar to their faces.

"Who is _they_," cried John, sounding aggrieved and increasingly confused.

Deeper in the school building, a bell rang, shrill and irritating. John winced and Robert glanced around like he was trying to find the source of the mysterious noise, but the rest of them were used to it.

"Mr Small," Ert began again.

At least, Hugo thought, he had successfully distracted everyone from how maladapted Lucien might seem on the surface. Now that they were all looking at Robert, it was easy to think: _hey, comparatively, Lucien is actually doing pretty well._

"Can we go home," Maria interrupted finally.

"Be _quiet_," said John crossly. His face was flushed right across the cheeks, a symptom of confused frustration. Hugo, being a teacher of children, knew exactly how he felt. "The adults are talking--"

"Are you sure that's what we call this," she wondered loudly.

"_Maria_," hissed her father, turning to her, scandalised.

She subsided, rolling her eyes and crossing her arms, and slumped back into her chair.

Lucien caught his eye again and nodded more insistently toward the window. 

Hugo shook his head.

The second bell rang, and everyone ignored this one. 

The bickering continued, interspersed with Robert responding that _that's what they want you to think_ to increasingly unlikely accusations.

"Mr Vega," Mr Ert said, desperately, "I'm sure you have something to add, you're the boy's teacher."

A subtle managerial technique known as passing the buck, Hugo reflected. He stepped out from the wall against which he'd been standing, using his physical presence and bright coat to take up more space in the room. "I think," he interrupted John and Robert, loudly, just to stop them from talking any longer. All of them paid attention to the new, loud voice, and turned to look his way. They all finally stopped talking to listen.

Unlike the school's principal, Hugo actually had to command the attention of thirty loud children every class period, so this was not a surprise to him. "I think that regardless of what happened here today, we can all agree on the importance of -- er," he paused, "supportive parental figures. We all know how important discipline is in the lives of our students, so it's vital that they have good parental role models who support their... emotional growth... and who establish firm boundaries, and routines, and good, uh, good dental hygiene--"

This was when he realised Lucien was sliding out of his chair and creeping around behind the group of adults -- and Maria -- while they were distracted by his talking. 

Part of him, the professional part, which had been enforcing discipline for more than a decade, wanted to interrupt his own speech and yell at him, _what do you think you're doing_; another part just wanted _one of them_ to escape that stifling room.

There was a split-second in which to make the decision. His heart pounded. He could feel the sweat at the back of his neck.

Hugo looked away, toward John instead. The window did not even squeak when Lucien opened it, although he must have made some noise, because Robert blinked, hard, and very carefully did not turn his head to follow the movement.

Lucien disappeared out the window.

His student. Hugo's student. To whom he was meant to be setting a good example. He just -- climbed out the window.

It wasn't even a ground floor window.

Immediately and horribly, Hugo had... regrets.

"--while it's great that you were both so willing to come and discuss the matter this afternoon, I think it's important that you both consider having a discussion with your children about setting boundaries," he finished, which -- what was Hugo even saying? He didn't remember. He was too caught up in the heart-pounding spectacle of Lucien's escape.

"Right," said Mr Ert, in a tone of relief, "that's very true, thank you, Mr Vega, we--" he turned back around and paused. "Where's Lucien?"

"What," said Robert, making a big show of looking around innocently. 

"He left? He left. Did you see--" Mr Ert looked back toward Hugo, who blinked at him. "No," Ert decided, "of course you didn't." He pulled off his glasses and cleaned them on his shirt.

Phew.

"Are you _serious_," said Maria, suddenly noticing the open window. “He literally just left! You want to lecture _me_ about -- about boundaries and respect, or, like, whatever, but --"

"Maria, _be quiet_," said John, again.

"No," she snarled, right back, which was pretty much what Hugo had expected.

"_Young lady you will sit there and be quiet until I tell you that you may speak. _Aren't you in enough trouble? Trying to buy _drugs_ at school?" said her dad, which was... also pretty much what Hugo had expected. He got the impression that her mum probably did the lion's share of the parenting.

Maria made a furious face, and her hands clenched into fists on the arms of her chair. Hmm.

“He _left_," said Robert, responding to -- Hugo didn't know. Either Maria or the principal, he wasn't sure. "You think he left you? He left _me_." He took a deep breath, bracing himself for cruel reality. Unfortunately the breath he exhaled in exchange didn't smell especially sober. "Everyone does, eventually. That was cold, kid," and now he was, presumably talking to Lucien, who was, as established, not even there anymore. "Real cold. But a man… a man’s gotta save himself.”

Hugo rubbed the bridge of his nose and, giving up, took Lucien's vacated seat.

"What," said Mr Ert, fed up, "are you _talking about_?"

Robert, predictably, flung himself into a narrative about his ghost hunting days and a man like a brother to him who betrayed him by leaving him behind. It took a while. Hugo glanced at the clock three times, watching the minutes tick by, but he was the only one. Nobody interrupted him -- not even Maria.

"Years later," he said gravely, after his seven-minute-thirteen-second, rambling story, "I learnt that lesson from the other side. The screams of my partner fading into the distance on that black, black night will haunt me forever. I still hear them when I sleep." A pause. "Sometimes when I'm awake, too. But sometimes a man has to save his own skin."

He stared out the window, the one Lucien left ajar, with a pensive and unsettled air. There was a silence that stretched out a bit too long.

Hugo stood up again and clapped his hands in the silence and said, “Well, I think we’ve all had an – erm – enlightening discussion. Please let Lucien -- and Damien -- know he’s suspended for the next two days –” 

And Robert gave him a thousand yard stare for three long seconds, then nodded once, all solemnly.

"Mr Ert," John was saying, standing up, red-faced, "this is ridiculous."

But, actually, Hugo had to get to class. "Let me show you out," he said, giving Robert a steady stare.

He opened the door for him pointedly.

Robert went without protest, easy as anything, hands in his pockets and eyes still bloodshot and unfocused.

"Was it really that bad," he asked, once they were walking down the deserted corridor together, voices echoing softly from the rows of dented metal lockers.

Hugo sighed. "Between you and me, there's no rule against selling oregano on school grounds."

Robert snorted in the back of his throat. "Oregano?"

Hugo sighed again, kind of... harder this time. "Honestly, I prefer that the other students don't figure it out," to be clear, by 'other students' he absolutely meant 'Ernest' here, "and find a new 'supplier'."

Robert laughed until he coughed, and it didn't make Hugo feel any better.

A heavy hand clapped him on the shoulder at the doors. "You know Kim and Jim's?" Robert didn't wait for him to indicate whether or not he did. "If you ever decide to unwind--" He made a vague, expressive gesture, which Hugo interpreted to mean 'I don't want to commit to actually inviting you, but I'll be around if you want'. 

"Thank you," he said neutrally, meaning, _absolutely not._ The sunlight flared across the concrete floor when he pried the front doors of the school building open with a protesting creak. "I'll keep that in mind."

"Sure," said Robert, before disappearing out into the daylight.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Lucien's Teachers Just Want Him to Stop Selling Oregano to the Other Students [podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23547757) by [Arioch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arioch/pseuds/Arioch), [bunpods](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bunpods/pseuds/bunpods), [KD reads (KDHeart)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KDHeart/pseuds/KD%20reads), [podfic_lover](https://archiveofourown.org/users/podfic_lover/pseuds/podfic_lover), [the24thkey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the24thkey/pseuds/the24thkey), [The_Casual_Sounds (the_casual_cheesecake)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_casual_cheesecake/pseuds/The_Casual_Sounds), [thriceandonce (sylvaine)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sylvaine/pseuds/thriceandonce)


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